The British Parliament continued their investigation into Barclays Bank and the Libor scandal this week, and it’s just getting worse and worse for everyone involved. Yesterday, Jerry del Missier, the former COO of Barclays, testified that he was instructed by CEO Bob Diamond to manipulate the Libor down in 2008, to mask the ill financial health of the bank.

As the Libor scandal intensifies, some of the scrutiny has shifted from the role of the banks to the role of the regulators who potentially either actively ignored the rate-rigging happening under their noses, or outright encouraged it. This was the accusation leveled by former Barclays Bank CEO Bob Diamond, though BoE official deny it. But it fits a larger pattern of regulators protecting the banks through actions and inaction on wrong doing.

A whistleblower from Barclays Bank makes the obvious point that former CEO Bob Diamond had to know about the various fixings of the Libor benchmark inter-bank lending rate before he claims to have found out: Speaking on condition of anonymity, the banker says that senior Barclays bosses would have been told about Libor concerns because [...]

The Economist talks of a forfeiture of trust in the leading financial institutions. That was forfeited for many of us a long time ago. But if it takes establishment organs a scandal of this magnitude to come along, so be it.

I had hopes for the British Parliament’s inquiry into the LIBOR scandal, based on watching MPs going at each other in the open sessions on C-SPAN. The British people are genuinely outraged by Barclays’ admission that it fraudulently fixed the interest rate charged to millions of customers and on billions if not trillions of financial instruments. My hopes were shared by The Guardian’s liveblogger, Andrew Sparrow, who wrote that today would be “… some kind of day of reckoning for banking as a whole.” After it was over, he repents

There’s a closely watched Parliamentary hearing with Bob Diamond, the former CEO of Barclays Bank who resigned after the scandal of bank employees rigging the benchmark Libor inter-bank lending rate. It’s been fairly explosive, as Diamond accused Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, of essentially encouraging Barclays to manipulate the Libor rates, to make their financial situation look less dire.

Barclays Bank CEO Bob Diamond, who initially resisted resignation over his bank’s fraudulent manipulation of the benchmark Libor inter-bank lending rate (as well as Euribor, the euro equivalent), has now resigned, a day before testifying before Parliament. The Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, the two top regulators in Britain, reportedly encouraged him to go.

I’ve sort of missed all the hubbub surrounding Barclay’s Bank interest rate manipulation troubles. As I understand it, the bank was fined a fairly trivial amount by the CFTC and the Justice Department, compared to what they reaped in profits, on the fraudulent use of the LIBOR.